Hermione quickly laid her hand on his.
"I was only laughing. You know your padrona trusts you to remember her as she remembers you."
Gaspare lifted up her hand quickly, kissed it, and hurried away, lifting his own hand to his eyes.
"These Sicilians know how to make one love them," said Hermione, with a little catch in her voice. "I believe that boy would die for me if necessary."
"I'm sure he would," said Maurice. "But one doesn't find a padrona like you every day."
"Let us walk to the arch," she said. "I must take my last look at the mountains with you."
Beyond the archway there was a large, flat rock, a natural seat from which could be seen a range of mountains that was invisible from the terrace. Hermione often sat on this rock alone, looking at the distant peaks, whose outlines stirred her imagination like a wild and barbarous music. Now she drew down Maurice beside her and kept his hand in hers. She was thinking of many things, among others of the little episode that had just taken place with Gaspare. His outburst of feeling, like fire bursting up through a suddenly opened fissure in the crust of the earth, had touched her and something more. It had comforted her, and removed from her a shadowy figure that had been approaching her, the figure of a fear. She fixed her eyes on the mountains, dark under the silver of the moon.
"Maurice," she said. "Do you often try to read people?"
The pleasant look of almost deprecating modesty that Artois had noticed on the night when they dined together in London came to Delarey's face.
"I don't know that I do, Hermione," he said. "Is it easy?"